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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27947342">the irreversible fire</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/highfaenyx/pseuds/dancingwiththewind'>dancingwiththewind (highfaenyx)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood &amp; Manga</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, character study of a kind</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 23:27:48</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,917</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27947342</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/highfaenyx/pseuds/dancingwiththewind</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>she became the irreversible fire in Roy Mustang’s hands instead.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Riza Hawkeye &amp; Roy Mustang, Riza Hawkeye/Roy Mustang</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>33</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>the irreversible fire</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Riza Hawkeye compartmentalised rage and fear in her brain. They all went to the little neat spaces in her head, and she would carefully pour them out whenever she needed. Rage went out stored in bullets of one of her fire guns; fear was was conquered in hugs and embraces she’s given Hayate.</p>
<p>Clarity. Concentration. Aim.</p>
<p>There was simply no room for anything else. She could not allow for it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Once, it was different. Once, she was a renown alchemist’s daughter. Once, she believed that good was good, and power had a morale behind it, and all would be fine in the end.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>They said to her that a soldier always remembered their first kill. Riza didn’t; she doubted anyone did, really — her first kill was a faceless soldier in the crowd, one of the many, indistinguishable behind helmets and ammunition. She shot together with other snipers from her squad, not even sure her bullets would land; her fingers were a bit shaky. It was war, and it was her first battle, and Riza expected dread and horror; but everything she did was pulling the trigger, time after time. People fell, on the other side of trenches, on the streets and in the sands of the country they were sent to, like scarecrows made of hay.</p>
<p>Her fingers stopped fidgeting. She didn’t remember her second or third of fourth kill; she didn’t keep count, she simply pulled the trigger, alchemists snapped their fingers, and dolls in the distance fell. She didn’t think too much about it. She didn’t care.</p>
<p>The war was easy for her. Riza — Riza Hawkeye was good at war, at guns and bullets and knives. Her very own fire alchemy of gunpowder.</p>
<p><em>My father would be proud</em>, she thought.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>One day, she was sent on an operation — a simple one, a shot in the dark, she did dozens of similar ones already. She saw her fellow soldier, supposed to distract the rebel climbing out of a back door of a safe house, fall. She was prepared, and snatched a knife from under her belt, and turned around — to find her target at her heels. Riza moved quickly, avoided a blow and slushed his throat in a precise, calculated fashion.</p>
<p>Missions like this were only for the darkest of nights when the sky would be covered in thick layers behind layers of clouds. But this night, by chance or by purpose, the clouds cleared when the body collapsed on the roof, and the moon shined brightly, illuminating the face of the man. He was not a man; barely a boy. His features were soft; something in the line of his mouth reminded Riza of Roy — when he had just started the apprenticeship with her father — and something shuddered within her.</p>
<p>He was not a soldier she expected; not a warrior she assumed all the faces in the crowd to be. His moves were clumsy, and he had nothing on one of the best snipers the army had. He had no chance of winning against Riza.</p>
<p>The brief moment of moonlight ceased to be; the night was dark again, and the body on the roof Riza stood on turned into a dark heap of fabric and blood.</p>
<p>But she — she still saw a boy beneath the darkness.</p>
<p>And for the first time since the time that was supposed to be the <em>first</em>, her fingers tremored.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>***</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Where Riza saw the crowd before, she saw only faces instead.</p>
<p>A weathered man in ragged clothing holding an old, outdated gun; a girl with a dagger and determination in her eyes; another boy — just like one on the roof, the <em>first </em>one — with a parchment and a message.</p>
<p>Riza was good at pulling the trigger, at following orders, at being a loyal dog — so she did. But now every bullet she fired had a face; it was another ticket to hell, another soul weighing her down.</p>
<p>She kept a count now, almost compulsively; she never knew her memory was so good.</p>
<p>She couldn’t sleep. She managed to stop the fidgeting of her hands most of the time when she held a gun, but paid a steep price of pushing her hands between her calves to stop them from moving when she lied down to rest.</p>
<p>She considered dropping her armour and leaving. <em>Deserting</em>, her mind hissed, and Riza shivered.</p>
<p>She thought of missing on purpose, and almost resolved to it — until her captain, a far worse shooter than she had ever been, fired a bullet she was supposed to, and his target died in an agony stretching on for hours. Riza ended it.</p>
<p>She always fired her gun, after. At least her aim was precise.</p>
<p>She felt too much, her father told her. <em>Just like your mother</em>, he used to say, bitterness and grief in his voice, on the days when she reminded him of her too much. <em>Just like you, </em>Riza would think when he would lock himself in his study for hours and days that followed.</p>
<p>Except now she didn’t feel anything at all.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>***</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Her life did not have a meaning; maybe, it never did.</p>
<p>The life was a sequence of possibilities, but the world was too small to allow for a consequence, and the war was just an excuse.</p>
<p>Riza looked at Roy Mustang and saw her father’s apprentice. Her dear friend, her best friend, a brother in arms who was never really a <em>brother</em> to her. She saw a boy on the roof, a girl with a dagger, a weathered man with a gun in his face, his posture, his eyes, and for the first time in what seemed like forever, Riza Hawkeye felt something.</p>
<p>Maybe, the meaning has always been there, concealed in a face of a dark-haired boy with a hunger for knowledge and a smile contrasting his sharp features. </p>
<p>It was a flicker first; and then it grew.</p>
<p>She asked to be reassigned to Mustang’s squad — that was easy, no one in the right mind would reject the best sniper the army had. <em>Two legends, and in one squad, </em>they whispered behind her in the barracks. <em>They would win all wars.</em></p>
<p>Riza wasn’t sure she cared about winning anymore. This war was never about winning, but she — <em>they — </em>understood it far too late.</p>
<p>She would speak to him and Hughes — about stupid things, senseless things, things that did not matter at all. They would laugh, and trade jokes before they went to their battles and missions, and have quiet dinners after. Their normalcy was a pretence, the jokes were unfunny, the conversations were witty at best, and they all knew it — but Riza was grateful. She couldn’t concentrate on faces in her head so much when they were like this.</p>
<p>They might have been — no, they <em>were </em>— all broken. She counted faces and bullets lying sleepless in the night; next to her, Roy tossed and turned, and she knew that his fiery nightmares were sometimes worse than her insomnia. Hughes went for a walk — or for a smoke, or a drink, she didn’t know — and did not return until morning. Riza would wake up Roy when his restlessness grew insufferably, and they would sit together, bar to back, in silence. It was different, with Hughes, and with Roy.</p>
<p>Hughes had someone to come back to.</p>
<p>Roy had a dream. The light of his eyes was sucked by a war dragging him down, but he had a vision of a world where the power would not be the end to whatever means someone deems necessary, and his hope managed to dissolve the desolation of emotion in her heart.</p>
<p>The feeling was raw and deep, too much after the numbness she felt for so long, and sometimes the air caught up in her lungs from the intensity of it. She felt protective, almost possessive, hungry and raging to help him, shield him, aid him. He made her feel, made her hope that the morale she once believed in, too, was possible. She felt far too dirty to be able to believe in it again: the list in her head grew endlessly, and the stack of bullets was infinite, but it was enough if he did. The rest was her job now.</p>
<p>Riza had Roy, and that was enough.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>***</p>
<p> </p>
<p>They survived the war.</p>
<p>After, they made careful, calculated plans.</p>
<p>Something big was coming, and they had to prepare. Amidst this, Riza had found herself giving an impossible vow.</p>
<p>“Kill me if you need to.”</p>
<p>Riza’s fingers fidgeted, and she gripped her knees to still them.</p>
<p>“You are the only one who can.”</p>
<p>“I will,” she was stern and determinate. She was his handle, his boundary, the last bridge to his humanity. It was only fair, and maybe, a bit ironic. Well, she had her morale instead, for all it was worth. Riza made a promise, but she’d never promised she wouldn’t follow him even after she ’d fulfil his wish, and Roy’d never asked.</p>
<p>Maybe it made things harder for him. Maybe it was easier to think that you wouldn’t arrive to the gates of hell alone. She didn’t know the answer herself.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>***</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Riza felt her fingers twitch.</p>
<p>She once hoped that normalcy would bring her back to life, would cleanse her mind and her soul. It was easy to believe in, for a while. But the fidgeting kept coming back, and her memory was filled with faces staring at her even in her sleep.</p>
<p><em>Maybe a shrink? </em>Rebecca suggested to her the other day.</p>
<p>Riza contemplated her offer for some time, but then she was feeling better, and doctors were never really her thing.</p>
<p>She was feeling better, almost <em>fine</em> — and then Hughes left, and the world shattered.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>She had to show up for the funeral. She dragged on, until she couldn’t, until Roy signalled at the door of her house and she had to get up and get down, and climb into the seat. Roy was pale — with rage or with grief, she didn’t know. His eyes took a sharp, empty edge she suspected she shared in her tremoring fingers.</p>
<p>She didn’t touch the casket because her shivering hands were hid under the coat.</p>
<p>
  <em>You failed him.</em>
</p>
<p>Riza flinched, her own voice in her head stunting her. She closed her eyes, and dreaded for her perfect, flawless memory to come and paint Hughes as a face in the crowd of dead men she could not protect.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>***</p>
<p>“I will pick up Hayte’s collar,” she said to him. <em>I don’t want to be alone now.</em></p>
<p>He shrugged, his eyes still carrying that dull edge. <em>You don’t have to. I am here. </em>“Sure.”</p>
<p>“Just for a moment,” she said, more to herself than to him, and he gave her a strange look. “Just a moment.”</p>
<p>“Be my guest.”</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>Riza sat down on the floor of his flat. Downstairs, loud music played in his aunt’s bar, and Riza was grateful because silence, once so welcome, was now close to unbearable; she closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.</p>
<p>She was back at the field fire she shared with Hughes and Roy during the war. Still empty. Still broken. But she could pretend all three of them were alive, and breathing, and the list in her head, triggered by the funeral, dulled. She heard the ruffle of his shirt, and in a moment, his warm, familiar back leaned on hers. It reminded her of the time way back then when her insomnia and his nightmares collided in the cold night of Ishwar.</p>
<p>She sighed. She was still sleepless at nights. He still had his nightmares. They didn’t change, and the world was still the same dark place they discovered it to be.</p>
<p>Roy reached for her hand, and squeezed it. “Riza,” he said.</p>
<p>She threw her head back on his shoulder, and turned to the crook of his neck. He was old parchments and fire logs in the winter, and when she touched him, her flawless memory faded away. He burrowed his face into her hair, and she knew he felt the same.</p>
<p>Even in a pitch black darkness, they had each other.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>***</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In her mind, she knew that even if Roy failed, another one would come and try. Edward Elric, his brother, Olivia Armstrong, Rebecca — they would all be there, and someone would succeed. It would take more time, more effort; in her mind, she knew that they also needed her, her expertise, her help, her loyalty.</p>
<p>Riza was a dog of war once; she made a vow be one. That Riza was gone, burnt in fires of Ishwar, spent by her own bullets and her memory.</p>
<p>The new Riza Hawkeye was broken in many ways — most of which would never heal. Her headspace was full of faces of people she knew and loved and hated and didn’t have time to recognise; they would be her personal ticket to hell when the time would come.</p>
<p>All that, and she was a Roy Mustang’s dog.</p>
<p>She had thought her world had shattered after the boy on the roof, <em>her first. </em>She had known she had been wrong the moment Hughes had been killed — <em>failed yet once more. </em>Where others saw an impeccable death toll and a hero’s medal, she only saw death and regret.</p>
<p>She braced her failure. Made plans. She had to aid Roy; she could handle the pain.</p>
<p>She knew she’d deceived herself when Lust told her he is dead.</p>
<p>
  <em>Feeling too much. Like father or mother? I don’t remember.</em>
</p>
<p>What she felt for him has always been the one thing she could not compartmentalise and seal away. That was a feeling that kept her breathing, kept her going on, gave her a meaning. Without him…</p>
<p>Without him, the compartmentalising did not matter. Breathing didn’t matter. Being loyal didn’t matter.</p>
<p>Riza <em>knew </em>she was more than a gun in his hands. More than his most trusted advisor, more than his best friend; more than someone he would accept going so easily. She knew, and yet…</p>
<p>Her hands fidgeted. Her mind blew up in a hot wave of rage, and she fired, again and again — but if Roy’s fire was not enough, her gunpowder would never be.</p>
<p>She couldn’t bring herself to care.</p>
<p>Her recklessness both scared her and made her strong.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Riza felt more than relief when she saw his face again. It was like life breathed back in her. Everything was so colourful, at once, and everything had a meaning. His eyes were fixed on her, and she saw the intensity mirroring hers inside.</p>
<p>Not for the first time, she wondered if feeling that way was — healthy. If Rebecca was right, and she would just need to find a shrink, a doctor that would fix her.</p>
<p>Riza knew a lot about alchemy for someone who’s never used it. Most — from the composite of being lonely in a large house that almost never felt like home and only her father’s books to entertain herself with, and some — from Roy, when they both needed to fill the silence between them and the world.</p>
<p>In alchemy, there were processes one could reverse: rods turned to swords and back, trees grew and shrank, even blood could be deconstructed and flowed seamlessly back into one’s veins.</p>
<p>The fire alchemy was irreversible. Fire sought destruction, destruction sought entropy, and the entropy increased, locking the process.</p>
<p>Riza Hawkeye was the living example of the third law of the alchemical thermodynamics. Fixing - reverse - was impossible. The damage had been done, the entropy increased, the bridges burned.</p>
<p>She became the irreversible fire in Roy Mustang’s hands instead.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>***</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Riza knew Envy wasn’t him the moment he failed to fall into the steps with her. He didn’t notice the way her hands fidgeted on the gun handle. It was an easy mask to peel off, and uneasy decision to make.</p>
<p>Then, in the same corridors, her throat was slit open, and suddenly she felt like the only thing connecting Roy with his humanity. Her eyes would burn a hole in his head if they could.</p>
<p>Riza saw him a tad too close to the darkness than ever — at the boundary she had sworn to guard for him, the one assignment she truly hated, and begged, <em>don’t. I can follow you to the devil’s lair — hell, we can go together, who would stop us with the lists of deaths’ faces we carry? But there are places in hell that are closed even for me. There is a darkness where I cannot find you, even though I will be searching for all eternity. Don’t choose this way.</em></p>
<p>She felt too much, someone said to her a long time ago. She wasn’t sure who, but it had felt like an insult back then. Now, it felt like her only virtue.</p>
<p>
  <em>I need you.</em>
</p>
<p>Something flickered in his eye, a concealed shadow of the intensity they shared.</p>
<p>He gripped her shoulders in a tight, almost painful embrace when Mei healed her.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Later, after everything was done and sealed, enemies were defeated, Roy’s vision was to be back, they lay together on her hospital bed, and he whispered in return. “I need you, too.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The world was still a dark, cruel, unforgivingly irreversible place. But the darkness flickered with lights at the edges of Roy’s eyes, at the tips of her trembling, bruised fingers, in the faces of all they have saved and cared for, engraved in her flawless memory, and in end…</p>
<p>In the end, they always had each other.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>When I think of loyalty, I think of Riza Hawkeye. I hope I have found the right words.</p>
<p>Kudos and comments make my day :)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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